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As the fallout from yesterday’s announcement of the departure of their CEO and programming/operations boss continues, Air Idiot is trying its damnedest to paint it as nothing to get excited about, with Evan Cohen, Air Idiot’s majordomo, calling the moves “natural changes to a rapid startup.” If that is true, I’d like to know why they failed to post a release in their press room treating it as such. Nothing. Nada. El Zippo.

Others are painting the picture with different colors, laying the blame for the current situation to Air Idiot’s lack of experience navigating in RadioLand. From the Los Angeles Times:

“These people do not seem to be following the kind of business plan one would expect from a stable and formidable broadcast operation,” said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers, a magazine that follows the talk-radio business. “Chaos at a start-up is a bad sign, especially when the CEO disappears.”

Harrison, a very busy boy yesterday, told the Washington Post the problem was Air Idiot couldn’t separate their political objectives–Beat Bush/Crush Rush–from the business of running a viable radio operation:

“One would have to question their business plan — whether you’re liberal or conservative, whether you’re playing music or comedy, radio is radio and it requires sound broadcasting practices.”

But ripping the Right is the business plan.
Departing CEO Mark Walsh’s knickers got all knotty yesterday after Limbaugh weighed in on Air Idiot’s woes on his show:

“Rush is a big, fat liar, just like Al Franken said,” Walsh said. “Apparently, Rush saw a C-SPAN show I did where I said that one of the reasons that right-wing radio dominates radio so well is that they have a lot of talent. . . . He’s very good at radio. He’s an entertainer, not a pundit. And now because I praised a right-wing host, he says I’m getting [expletive]-canned. I think the OxyContin has kicked in, because it takes a drug-addled mind to think that up.”

I went to Limbaugh’s website, where they had posted the audio of the bit. Limbaugh never said Walsh had been shit-canned. He said “He quit, resigned, or was forced out, we don’t know which.” And he hadn’t seen the C-SPAN show. What he was doing was going to school on Walsh’s ass, using the defunct CEO’s own words to show how clueless the clown is to radio reality, how Walsh didn’t even understand what Arbitron’s numbers mean, and how contemptuous lefties like Air Idiot believe those who don’t drink their Kool-Aid are mindless lemmings. From the accompanying transcript:

VOICE[Walsh]: Yes, the number of stations he is on is staggering. Yes, the number of hours available per day for the right-wing to shove their vitriol and bile down the throats of unsuspecting listeners continues to grow, but let me suggest to you that entertainment that is successful will overtake this wave that we missed the timing on.

RUSH: All right. First off, you all are unsuspecting. My vitriol and bile get forced down your throat every day and you don’t know it’s coming! You people turn in here as innocent waifs, you come in here clean as the wind driven snow and unsuspectingly get corrupted and poisoned by my vitriol and bile, and you have no idea when it’s coming. They are stupid because they missed out on the timing of this wave. There was no wave. There was no timing. There was not a strategy. I’m not a political strategy. There was no big meeting, no grand design. Nobody put a finger to the pulse of the American people and said, “you know what’s missing? Let’s do this on the radio.” This is not how this happened. They continue to illustrate they haven’t the slightest idea how success happens, and that’s, in all of the stories about this program or any other… Well, let me stick with mine. I’m not going to talk about anybody else. In all of the stories that I’ve seen in 15 1/2 years about this program, the concept of the singular achievement here is always omitted. How do we get to 600 stations, Mark? How do we get 20 million people a week? How does this happen?

Whenever movies draw great numbers at the box office or when television shows draw huge ratings, everybody talks about the talent and the achievement and the business success of all those involved in that. When it comes to talk radio, it’s an accident. It’s an accident resulting from your, the audience’s, stupidity and the pied pipers Svengali conspiracy behind me to drive unsuspecting listeners crazy with vitriol and bile. Well, you have no idea what’s coming.

So once again, if they’re going to insult their potential audience and continue to do it, they have no prayer. They have no clue, and they have no hope because they don’t even stop to look at this as a business or any other kind of achievement, that it’s not just happenstance or fattish. It’s ongoing and constantly building. Despite all the other conservative shows that are out there, we haven’t cannibalized each other, we are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and they just can’t figure it out. And because these are socialists in their thinking, I mean, everything gets to the people from the top down. So they think this has to have been forced on you. What they don’t understand is you, the audience, get what you want, choose what you want, and therefore make those of us who are successful, successful. That’s what they don’t get.

What he said! I used to be a big Stern fan, but then he started recycling his schtick and he lost me. If I ain’t getting something interesting and entertaining, I’m gone. Air Idiot doesn’t get that.

Oh, and you gotta hear the audio of Limbaugh saying, “Well, you have no idea what’s coming.” Sounded like “you wanna see ‘vitriol and bile’, asshole?”
The Air America Idiot Archive